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#1 Structural Causal Bandits under Markov Equivalence [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi] [REL]

Authors: Min Woo Park, Andy Arditi, Elias Bareinboim, Sanghack Lee

In decision-making processes, an intelligent agent with causal knowledge can optimize action spaces to avoid unnecessary exploration. A *structural causal bandit* framework provides guidance on how to prune actions that are unable to maximize reward by leveraging prior knowledge of the underlying causal structure among actions. A key assumption of this framework is that the agent has access to a fully-specified causal diagram representing the target system. In this paper, we extend the structural causal bandits to scenarios where the agent leverages a Markov equivalence class. In such cases, the causal structure is provided to the agent in the form of a *partial ancestral graph* (PAG). We propose a generalized framework for identifying potentially optimal actions within this graph structure, thereby broadening the applicability of structural causal bandits.

Subject: NeurIPS.2025 - Poster